PLANS to turn a historic university campus into a college for overseas students have been branded “vandalism” by city councillors.

Birmingham City University is set to turn the School of Art, based at two buildings on Linden Road and Maple Road, Bournville, into a new international college which will open its doors in the autumn.

The art school, which has been based in Bournville since 1903, is moving to the university’s new £61 million Birmingham Eastside campus which will be the new home for the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design from next year.

The new Bournville campus college, called Birmingham City University International College (BCUIC) will teach foundation programmes for international students wanting to study UK degrees in subjects including art and design and business.

Successful students will then qualify to study at the university itself.

The college will open at the Maple Road Site in the autumn and at the Linden Road site in September 2013.

The move has been met with fury by Bournville Conservative councillors Robert Sealey, Timothy Huxtable and Nigel Dawkins, who denounced the plans on their website.

But Prof Chris O’Neil, executive dean of the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, insisted the university was committed to a future in Bournville.

“Yet the university intends to shamefully discard all of this art and craft history and instead use the buildings to run courses preparing foreign students for other courses within their university program.

“In a city that still has ambitions to be a leading design and manufacturing centre, the notion that we should close such a prestigious art and design college is unthinkable.

“We have unacceptable levels of youth unemployment in Birmingham and it is their future the university should be concentrating on rather than foreign students.”

The new international college will see the university working in partnership with Australian education company Navitas, which already operates eight colleges in the UK.

A total of 325 overseas students will start in October as part of the ten-year agreement.

Prof O’Neil said transferring art and design courses to the new Eastside side campus had been long agreed, but many details of the international college venture “had to be kept confidential” as Navitas was a limited company.

He said: “We are not closing, we are changing the direction of the campus.

“Bournville is a great place to have the college because the students can develop their confidence. They are travelling from the other side of the world and we want them to learn in a safe environment.”